CPUC debunks Frontier’s service claims, approves FTTH grant in Phelan

The high desert community of Phelan, in San Bernardino County, will get gigabit class fiber to the home service. The California Public Utilities Commission voted four to one yesterday to approve a $28 million grant to Race Telecommunications, which will cover 60% of the cost of building the project. The single no came from commission president Michael Picker.

The CPUC also did some ground truthing and discovered Frontier’s service claims did not line up with reality, according to commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen…

Since our last meeting [CPUC staff] has gone down to Phelan’s central business district and established that they are in fact going forward with their upgrades to some households and businesses. They also though, and this I think is quite significant, they determined based on the engineering constraints of the project, that Frontier’s upgrade would not reach nearly 100% of the community not even the 85% that we thought before, but more like 60%. So 40% of the community would not be served. And that’s very significant. That means that we have a significant portion of the community would not be served in an area that we have identified as our highest priority.

But Rechtschaffen also warned that the Phelan project shouldn’t set a precedent, and other pending projects should be looked at differently.

The backlog of proposals for California Advanced Services Fund subsidies is being whittled down. Four grant applications are still pending, and only one of those – a middle mile project proposed by Ducor Telephone in the Tulare County mountain community of Kennedy Meadows – is completely outside of the current phase of the federal Connect America Fund subsidy program. Although, as a small rural telephone company, Ducor has access to money from related federal programs.